RingCentral Announces New Innovations to Make Hybrid Work Simple

RingCentral has announced several new innovations designed to make hybrid work simple.

“The world of work has changed and businesses are replacing outdated and cumbersome technology, tools, and platforms to simplify the lives of their employees,” said Kira Makagon, chief innovation officer.

“At RingCentral, our mission has always been to give users cloud communications technology that solves real-world challenges but is also easy to set up, use, and manage.

“Our latest innovations address the widespread challenges associated with hybrid work, empowering organizations to deliver transformative employee and customer experiences that more effectively connect and empower global teams with simple and flexible communications and collaborations.”

There are various new capabilities being launched today, each of which is designed to solve the challenges of hybrid work:

• Simplifying communications and collaboration
• Gaining data and insights to inform business decisions
• Enhancing customer experiences

Simplifying Communications and Collaboration

These new features help hybrid teams work better together, making meetings more effective and engaging:

RingCentral Webinar Solution

The recently announced webinar offering makes webinar experiences exceptionally simple for everyone. It is available as a beta to MVP customers.

AI-Based Advanced Meeting Insights and Summaries

RingCentral is launching AI-based Advanced Meeting Insights to help make teams more effective in catching up on the post-meeting experience.

Instead of watching entire meeting recordings, anyone can get caught up with what they have missed in minutes, even seconds, with AI-based short-form summaries, video highlights, hot-linked keywords, and additional automatically generated time-saving insights.

This feature is a “Best in Enterprise Connect 2022” innovation finalist and will be available as an open beta in Q2 ’22 for free and paid RingCentral Video customers.

Whiteboard

With RingCentral Whiteboard, meeting participants will be able to draw, upload images, type, and so much more to enhance their virtual collaboration experience. It includes unique, powerful functionality to help people find each other and jump to specific areas of the canvas instantly with a mini map functionality and “bring to me” feature. RingCentral Whiteboard will be generally available in Q2 ’22.

Live Transcription

Live Transcription uses AI to automatically transcribe conversations in real time. This feature is ideal for late joiners who can get caught up without disrupting the meeting. Transcripts can be reviewed at any time during the meeting and also downloaded for future reference. Live transcriptions will be generally available in Q2, ’22.

Participant Reactions

Users can use non-verbal cues in a meeting such as emojis and “slow down” or “go faster” indicators and more to meeting participants. Participant Reactions will be available in Q2 ’22.

Join Third Party Meetings From RingCentral Rooms

Businesses now can use RingCentral Rooms to join other video meetings from Zoom and Webex, making connecting into those meetings easier. Customers can simply use the SIP dialler to dial into the invited meetings from those meeting clients. This feature is planned for open beta at the end of March 2022.

RingCentral Add-ins

RingCentral Add-ins enable users to use their preferred applications and services within the RingCentral app without having to switch to a different app.

Today, RingCentral Add-ins include apps for Akazio, BeRemote, Bridge OC, Bugsnag, GitHub, Jira (Cloud and On-Prem), KeeperAI, Poll bot, RSI (Shadow Bot), and Trello. In Q2, RingCentral will release new apps for Aha!, Asana, Google Drive, Google Forms, Hubspot, and Workday, with many more to come.

RingCentral for Hubspot

RingCentral is launching a Hubspot integration to streamline communication and reporting workflows, building upon popular integrations such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Google, and Microsoft Teams. This integration is in open beta now and is planned for GA in Q2 ’22.

Advanced Call and Fax Blocking

With advanced call and fax blocking, users can now block specific numbers and area codes and customize their blocking options.

Users can also block calls and faxes with no caller ID, allow/block numbers that start with a specific area code, start with 1-800, allow/block only specific phone numbers and so on. This feature gives users the security controls they need to manage their work, wherever they do it. Advanced call and fax blocking are available to MVP customers immediately.

Sidney Ong, Head of Business Applications, BirdEye, the all-in-one software for businesses to grow their revenue, said, “RingCentral is our communication glue within the organization. We’ve integrated our own platform and developed real-time alerts. We’re now using features such as the new Add-in Poll bot – a critical tool to help us scale our collaboration and improve our efficiency.”

Gaining Data and Insights to Inform Business Decisions

Next-Gen Analytics for Lines of Business (LOB)

Designed to go beyond IT quality of service and usage metrics, RingCentral’s business analytics provides business users with summary statistics, trends and performance indicators that are critical for business decisions across sales, operations, finance, HR, facilities, and more.

Configurable Dashboards and Custom Reporting

Customers can now customize and share data views, key performance indicators, and reports on real-time or historical metrics from any device and without the need for specialized applications or skills. Analytic APIs are also available should developers need to access these same insights programmatically.

The RingCentral Analytics Suite empowers users to answer their most critical questions by giving them control of what they see, and how they see it, making business decisions a lot easier.

Availability: RingCentral next-gen business analytics, configurable dashboards, custom reporting, and analytics APIs are available as a beta to all MVP Standard, Premium, and Ultimate customers immediately.

Enhancing Customer Experiences

AI Agent Assist

With AI Agent Assist, built using Google’s contact centre AI, contact centre agents can respond faster and better with AI-powered Smart Reply and FAQ-Assist capabilities from Google. Smart Reply automatically suggests a response based on past conversations with customers.

FAQ-Assist suggests preconfigured answers based on the uploaded datasets and context of the conversation with the customer.

Video Elevation:

RingCentral Video capabilities in Engage Digital now help customers seamlessly elevate a conversation to a video conversation with an agent.

Virtual Agent Hub:

Virtual Agent hub simplifies deployment of customer-facing bots. Users can now leverage their existing investments in bots and orchestrate better customer journeys for smarter self-service.

Availability: AI Agent Assist, Video Elevation, Virtual Agent Hub are available to customers immediately.